There is little to indicate the recent presence of a railroad in the stretch from this spot up to the upper part of Conemaugh. The little plain into which the gap widened here, and in which stood the bulk of the town, is wiped out. The river has changed its course from one side of the valley to the other. There is not the slightest indication that the central part of the plain was ever anything but a flood-washed gulch in some mountain region. At the upper end of the plain, surrounded by a desert of mud and rock, stands a fantastic collection of ruined railroad equipments. Three trains stood there when the flood swept down the valley. On the outside was a local passenger train with three cars and a locomotive. It stands there yet, the cars tilted by the washing of the tracks, but comparatively uninjured. Somehow a couple more locomotives have been run into the sand bank. In the centre a freight train stood on the track, and a large collection of smashed cars has its place now. It was broken all to pieces. Inside of all was the day express, with its baggage and express cars, and at the end three vestibule cars. It was from this train that a number of passengers—fifteen certainly, and no one knows how many more—were lost. When the alarm came most of the passengers fled for the high ground. Many reached it; others hesitated on the way, tried to run back to the cars, and were lost. Others stayed on the cars, and, after the first rush of the flood, were rescued alive. Some of the freight cars were loaded with lime, and this leaped over the vestibule cars and set them on fire. All three of the vestibule cars were burned down to the trucks. These and the peculiar-shaped iron frames of the vestibules are all that show where the cars stood.
The reason the flood, that twisted heavy steel rails like twigs just below, did not wipe out these three trains entirely is supposed to be that just in front of them, and between them and the flood, was the round-house, filled with engines. It was a large building, probably forty feet high to the top of the ventilators in the roof. The wave of wrath, eye-witnesses say, was so high that these ventilators were beneath it. The round-house was swept away to its very foundations, and the flood played jackstraws with the two dozen locomotives lodged in it, but it split the torrent, and a part of it went down each side of the three trains, saving them from the worst of its force. Thirty-three locomotives were in and about the round-house and the repair shops near by. Of these, twenty-six have been found, or at least traced, part of them being found scattered down into Johnstown, and one tender was found up in Stony Creek. The other seven locomotives are gone, and not a trace of them has been found up to this time. It is supposed that some of them are in the sixty acres of débris above the bridge at Johnstown. All the locomotives that remain anywhere within sight of the round-house, all except those attached to the trains, are thrown about in every direction, every side up, smashed, broken, and useless except for old iron. The tenders are all gone. Being lighter than the locomotives, they floated easier, and were quickly torn off and carried away. The engines themselves were apparently rolled over and over in whichever direction the current that had hold of them ran, and occasionally were picked up bodily and slammed down again, wheels up, or whichever way chanced to be most convenient to the flood. Most of them lie in five feet of sand and gravel, with only a part showing above the surface. Some are out in the bed of the river.
A strange but very pleasant feature of the disaster in Conemaugh itself is the comparatively small loss of life. As the townspeople figure it out, there are only thirty-eight persons there positively known to have perished besides those on the train. This was partly because the buildings in the centre of the valley were mostly stores and factories, and also because more heed appears to have been paid to the warnings that came from up the valley. At noon the workmen in the shops were notified that there was danger, and that they had better go home. At one o’clock word was given that the dam was likely to go, and that everybody must get on high ground. Few remained in the central part of the valley when the high wave came through the gap.
Doré never dreamed a weirder, ghastlier picture than night in the Conemaugh Valley since the flood desolated it. Darkness falls early from the rain-dropping, gray sky that has palled the valley ever since it became a vast bier, a charnel-house fifteen miles long. The smoke and steam from the placers of smouldering débris above the bridge aid to hasten the night. Few lights gleam out, except those of the scattered fires that still flicker fitfully in the mass of wreckage. Gas went out with the flood, and oil has been almost entirely lacking since the disaster. Candles are used in those places where people think it worth while to stay up after dark. Up on the hills around the town bright sparks gleam out like lovely stars from the few homes built so high. Down in the valley the gloom settles over everything, making it look, from the bluffs around, like some vast death-pit, the idea of entering which brings a shudder. The gloomy effect is not relieved, but rather deepened, by the broad beams of ghastly, pale light thrown across the gulf by two or three electric lights erected around the Pennsylvania Railroad station. They dazzle the eye and make the gloom still deeper.
Time does not accustom the eyes to this ghastly scene. The flames rising and falling over the ruins look more like witches’ bale-fires the longer they are looked at. The smoke-burdened depths in the valley seem deserted by every living thing, except that occasionally, prowling ghoul-like about the edges of the mass of débris, may be seen, as they cross the beams of electric light, dark figures of men who are drawn to the spot day and night, hovering over the place where some chance movement may disclose the body of a wife, mother, or daughter gone down in the wreck. They pick listlessly away at the heaps in one spot for awhile and then wander aimlessly off, only to reappear at another spot, pulling feverishly at some rags that looked like a dress, or poking a stick into some hole to feel if there is anything soft at the bottom. At one or two places the electric lights show, with exaggerated and distorted shadows, firemen in big hats and long rubber coats, standing upon the edge of the bridge, steadily holding the hose, from which two streams of water shoot far out over the mass, sparkle for a moment like silver in the pale light, and then drop downward into the blackness.
For noise, there is heavy splashing of the Conemaugh over the rapids below the bridge, the petulant gasping of an unseen fire-engine, pumping water through the hose, and the even more rapid but greater puffing of the dynamo-engine that, mounted upon a flat car at one end of the bridge, furnishes electricity for the lights. There is little else heard. People who are yet about gather in little groups, and talk in low tones as they look over the dark, watchfire-beaconed gulf. Everybody in Johnstown looks over that gulf in every spare moment, day or night. Movement about is almost impossible, for the ways are only foot-paths about the bluffs, irregular and slippery. Every night people are badly hurt by falls over bluffs, through the bridge, or down banks. Lying about under sheds in ruined buildings, and even in the open air, wherever one goes, are the forms, wrapped in blankets, of men who have no better place to sleep, resembling nothing so much as the corpses that men are seen always to be carrying about the streets in the daytime.